Tara Kaess

Tara Kaess is a Talent Principal at Terrarium, the healthcare venture studio spun out of Company Ventures, where she leads founder and executive recruiting and helps operators become company-building CEOs.

Tara is drawn to experienced operators with deep domain expertise and the drive to build something new rather than run something that already exists. She has spent over a decade scaling early-stage startups through talent, and she holds a clear conviction about what matters most: more than capital or strategy, a company comes down to the founder and getting that hire right is what makes everything downstream possible. Tara doesn't wait for great operators to surface on their own. She seeks them out, brings them in, and gives them the resources, network, and conditions they need to build. That work is the engine behind Terrarium's Entrepreneur-in-Residence program, where she places seasoned operators into company-formation roles. She is happiest when she's turning exceptional people into high-impact teams.

Before joining Terrarium, Tara spent 6.5 years as Vice President of CEO Talent at Redesign Health. She joined as its tenth employee in September 2018 and helped scale the organization past 200 people, recruiting more than 60 Operating Company CEOs and building the founding teams for every Redesign venture. Along the way she partnered with founders from first check through launch. Earlier, she honed her executive-search craft at Daversa Partners, a leading firm that builds leadership teams for venture-backed tech companies. She began her career building leadership pipelines at Bridgewater Associates, where she developed a deep appreciation for data-driven talent strategy.

Tara lives in Westport, Connecticut with her husband and two children. She is a graduate of Boston College, where she earned her B.A. in Communication and English.